Dr Enormous, PhD

Immense Totality

[Dr Enormous, PhD @DrEnormousPhD]

Standard Christian doctrine holds that Jesus would still love you if you were a worm.

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

>Conservatives win an election
>Leftists appeal to the Constitution, the Rule of Law, Christianity, and the Founding Fathers to ensure that Conservatives never act against them
>Leftists win the next election
>They immediately discard all of these principles and begin ruthlessly imposing their will on society
>They go way too far, lose the following election, and instantly go back to appealing to the Constitution
>Conservatives: "The Constitution, huh? Why do you keep using that word?"
>Leftists:

[ib @Indian_Bronson]

This is actual Third Worldism btw. Trump is our first third world president.

Pugilist fights on the lawn of the national palace, appointing family to do diplomacy, self enriching via scams from elected office, losing an unpopular war but making time for celebrity ceremony, etc

[Rob Henderson @robkhenderson]

"When I worked in prison as a doctor, I asked hundreds of prisoners, in confidence, what they had actually done...almost all of them freely confessed that they had committed between five and 20 times as many crimes as they had been convicted of." https://t.co/oa46gwZZFf

[Dr Enormous, PhD @DrEnormousPhD]

@pervitinyummy I would argue that the screening process actively selects for this kind of shallowness.

[Dr Enormous, PhD @DrEnormousPhD]

@CEBKCEBKCEBK Well said

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Every glib, arrogant, virtue-signalling celebrity who’s broadcast the lie that kids will kill themselves if not allowed to transition deserves to have this read aloud to them non-stop through a megaphone for a year.

[garfieldbot @robertlasagna1]

What if the shrimp are all sadistic nihilists in a death cult and the one thing they all desire is the obliteration of themselves and all other shrimp, but they cover it up in fancy language and third rate baby's first philosophy

[Roman Helmet Guy @romanhelmetguy]

This “Rational Person” observed that humans have an instinct for altruism. They decided this was Rational. So they tried to intellectualize this instinct. Surely a simple formula must explain it? They settled on the formula max(pleasure-pain). But oops! Their formula doesn’t actually match human altruism. Humans care more about friends and family than insects. “Hm weird. Is my formula wrong? No! Humans are Irrational. They must change their instincts. That way my description of their instincts will be correct. That way they will be Rational. Like me. I am so Rational.”

[banteg @banteg]

>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful

>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg

>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality

>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking

>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets

>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future

>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"

>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now

>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner

>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value

>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god

>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete

>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully

>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved

>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical

>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical

>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic

>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign

>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important

>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples

>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me

>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting

>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous

>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field

>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels

>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends

>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment

>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back

>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc

>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere

>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review

>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed

>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly

>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better

>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"

>motte has entered the chat

>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren

>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy

>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored

>tell myself this is impartial altruism

>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"

>silence

>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval

>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"

>stare into cosmic light cone

>10^50 people staring back

>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions

>realize I have invented the perfect constituency

>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me

[Tadhg Ó Néill @antArdRi]

Two free republics, both colonized by the British, fought for their independence, only to then be cruelly partitioned by the tyrannical hand of perfidious Albion. They both continue the struggle against this unjust partition to liberated their divided brothers.

ONE STRUGGLE!🇮🇪🇺🇸

[William Meijer @williameijer]

It seems to me that high-status people are something like the square root of any social system. In other words, the bigger the social system, the smaller the percentage of high-status people. The impact of mass communication has been to globalize the social system, thereby creating a greater mass of low-status, discontented people—perfect for race communists to harvest for power. It used to be that a Senegalese man could be proud of being the strongest and most charismatic person in his village—something laudable in any epoch—but he’s now constantly bombarded with images and stories about how others at the end of the world are having it better than him, making him feel worse about himself and causing his peers to see him as lower status than they otherwise would. A lot in the world is downstream of this psychosocial dynamic

[Dr Enormous, PhD @DrEnormousPhD]

@SecScottBessent DEUS VULT

[Dr Enormous, PhD @DrEnormousPhD]

@SamuelB21133919 @StephanieStarrC @Polymarket No they won’t. Theyre all on drugs, or wireheading with GTA or sports gambling. There will be no incel revolution.

[Sara @teachermother1]

This is awesome, actually

[Dr Enormous, PhD @DrEnormousPhD]

@RandomSprint What do you mean, imagine?

[Dr Enormous, PhD @DrEnormousPhD]

@HedgeDirty 💯

[Kevin A. Bryan @Afinetheorem]

Loved this. Many know this, but case for recycling is basically just metal. Plastics too contaminated/too expensive, alternatives like tote bags and steel straws worse for environment. "Reduce" and "reuse" of course still matter + don't litter (biodegradable plastic is huge here)

[Christianity On The Spectrum @ChristianityOn]

In the seven years war, much of the conflict between the British and the French was fought not by the European powers, but their indigenous allies. In the same way, online politics is won by having allied autists beat the enemies autists.

[Marc Porter Magee 🎓 @marcportermagee]

This is a better way to visualize Columbus’ voyages than the traditional way (that shows him traveling through a modern map)..

It looks a lot crazier and more daring when you see it as a trip into the unknown.

[Dr Enormous, PhD @DrEnormousPhD]

@Scholars_Stage This is the way